Bragg structure and the first spectral gap

Periodic media are routinely used in optical devices and, in particular, photonic crystals to create spectral gaps, prohibiting the propagation of waves with certain temporal frequencies. In one dimension, Bragg structures, also called quarter-wave stacks, are frequently used because they are relatively easy to manufacture and the spectrum exhibits large spectral gaps at explicitly computable frequencies. In this short work, we use variational methods to demonstrate that within an admissible class of pointwise-bounded, periodic media, the Bragg structure uniquely maximizes the first spectral gap-to-midgap ratio.